Category Archives: Keyword Research

Anybody involved with Internet marketing - and especially search engine marketing - has likely heard the news that Google will no longer be displaying text ads in the right sidebar of search engine results. Instead, four text ads (previously three) will be displayed at the top of a search results page, while positions 5 through 7 will be pushed to the bottom.

This change is rightly causing quite a bit of confusion and apprehension, as it's thought that fewer ad positions per page will drive up AdWords bids and increase competition. Here are some of the most important takeaways from this rollout.

Looking at the top search trends of the year helps internet marketers, content creators, SEO professionals and webmasters understand how people use the internet. While these lists are typically dominated by celebrities, news events and sports moments, they nevertheless provide valuable insight and perspective for anyone hoping to attract more traffic to their site.

And while the importance of search engines may be diminishing slightly when compared to other methods of content delivery such as social media, these lists could help content creators find audiences in unexpected places (like Yahoo, for instance).

Despite social media creeping up on search as a leading source of referral traffic, search engines are still the number one way a user will find your site on the web. At the same time, you know that you need to undertake certain optimization strategies in order to get seen on search engines in the first place.

However, deciding which SEO strategies will benefit you most can be extremely difficult, as SEO's ROI is often difficult to measure, and search engine ranking criteria is changing all the time. Luckily, a new survey shines some light on what's working for most marketers.

Everybody knows how important images are on webpages. Visual content continues to get more and more popular, making pages that have large blocks of text without any images or video appear ever more outdated. Not to mention, image posts on social media tend to get much more engagement and traffic.

But while you've been adding images to your site to enhance user experience, you may have overlooked the SEO advantages that images can provide. Luckily, optimizing images for search engines is simple and it can have a noticeable effect on traffic and rank.

Google is the undisputed king of search. According to the latest numbers from Statcounter, Google had 75.2 percent of the search engine market share in December of 2014. However, while that number is indicative of Google's domination, it's actually a significant decrease from the prior month (77.3 percent) and from December of 2013 (79.3 percent). Google's market share hasn't been this low since 2008.

So what happened? Well, most experts point to the fact that Mozilla changed it's default search engine in Firefox to Yahoo last month. Indeed, Yahoo saw a nearly two percent gain.